InnoJam – Check List of technical goodies

I am by no means an expert in InnoJam – being a newbe and having only attended one. I say attended, but suffereing from 10 hour Jet Lag did not help at all 😐

But it was fun and next year I want to be prepared to some extent, or at least have a check list of technical goodies that might help during the Jam. Of course having a really good idea helps as well 🙂 and being open to innovative ideas from the team also helps. But having once been a Boy Scout, be prepared is my motto ….

Here is my Check List:

1. All PC / Tablet / Mobile display work should be done with HTML5 / CSS3 which allows for rapid prototyping and code that works accross all platforms.

– Interestingly it looks like Madrid InnoJam will use Windows 8 surface machines, and HTML5 (deployed as a web page, rather than a metro app) should work fine on these devices.

2. Use OData interface as JavaScript can easily be used with your HTML5 apps to talk to either NW Gateway or Hana.

– You could also use SUP workflow, but there are a lot of mobility platforms that SUP does not yet support e.g. BB 10 / Playbook / Windows 8 / Windows Phone 8. In my InnoJam team we ended up doing it both ways SUP and OData, but this ment we were coding right up to half an hour before the deadline !

3. Reporting – Use Hana as your backend database and use some predictive analysis to produce some interesting reports.

– Don’t just use Hana as a database, make sure you are using its in-memory power to predict trends or some other backend complex operation and then produce interesting pretty reports. (Thats what the winning team at innoJam did)

4. Demonstrate ease of use of your PC / Tablet / Mobile app by empoying the following techniques:

Touch screen,

Swipe screen,

Presence (some mobiles detect how close you are to the top of the unit)

GPS (position)

Voice

Pen

Orientation ( Accelerometer)

Movement (Accelerometer)

Interactive buttons

5. leverage the device API’s (Don’t build boring apps)

GPS

RFID

Barcode

Camera / Video

Accelerometer

Tempature

Altitude

Voice

Calendar

Email

Messages / Alerts

Play Video’s

Change colours / pictures

6. Prepare a winning script for your 6 minute presentation several hours earlier.

– Mention the following Magic words:

Hana

in-memory / predict trends / complex backend calculations

Cloud

Mobility

Full user centric experience

Interactive reporting

7. Have fun. 🙂